The Circle shareholder list features many Chinese capital players, including IDG, Baidu Ventures, Yixin, Everbright Holdings, CICC, Bitmain, and Huaxing Capital, most of whom invested between 2016 and 2018. China had a solid foundation in the cryptocurrency space.

I first learned about Circle in 2016 and thought the name was quite nice. A former colleague of mine was a designer at Circle, and they had a small team in Beijing at that time. However, not long after, the Chinese team was disbanded.